A few months ago I had one of my occasional lunches with a retired former senior CIA officer who spent years in Indochina during the 1960s and ’70s. Of course, per usual, we talked about the doleful war in Vietnam.
“It took me only about three weeks there to realize it was a total loser,” I offered at one point, and not for the first time. I’d spent a little under a year in Da Nang during 1968–69 running an Army Intelligence spy operation against the communists.
“Took me about three minutes,” the CIA man replied, with a slight ironic smile. A moment’s silence passed. What more was there to say?
It didn’t take a genius, in other words, to see that by the time we arrived in Vietnam the U.S. ground war was a horrible, horrible mistake. Our Saigon allies—Catholics in a Buddhist nation—were unreliable and cruel. The South Vietnamese government, including its army and intelligence agencies, was riddled with communist spies. Its troops could buy their way out of the draft. Corruption was endemic, sewn into the fabric of the regime. The muddy banks of the Saigon River were littered with the cardboard shacks of pitiful refugees.
President John F. Kennedy had seen the seeds of defeat early on and developed plans to withdraw some 16,000 American special forces advisers from the benighted country, a move embraced by his youthful defense secretary, Robert McNamara. But McNamara’s propensity for loyally echoing the views of his commanders in chief would prove fatal for millions under the slain president’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, an insecure Texan whose fears of failure in an upcoming election against a war-happy Republican drove him to desperate measures to stave off defeat, only to slide into the vortex of a conflict from which neither man could find a way to escape.
Why? That’s the heart of the matter in Peter L. W. Osnos’s LBJ and McNamara, a slim volume with a knife’s edge, even a half century later. Osnos, a distinguished journalist who was a Washington Post correspondent in Saigon between 1970 and 1973, was McNamara’s editor in his 1995 “explanatory memoir,” In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. Here he draws heavily on their recorded editing sessions, during which he struggled to get the famously buttoned-up bureaucrat to come completely clean. Even 20 years after the last U.S. troops escaped South Vietnam as the North Vietnamese Army closed in, it was difficult.
“I want you to know this,” McNamara said to Osnos in one of their first conversations. “You don’t have to act on it—but I have said if, when I finish this, I don’t think it’s going to be what I call constructive—which means non-self-serving, non-whitewashed, contributing to—I’ll call it healing the wounds—I’m going to tear up the contract. I’ll pay back the advance and I won’t publish.”
He was still an emotional wreck. His memoir was “constructive,” but not in ways he might have hoped. When the book was published, his mea culpa for pursuing victory in Vietnam while not believing in it drew big headlines, but the reviews were “scathing,” Osnos notes. The New York Times dedicated a prominent, denunciatory editorial to it—and to McNamara personally:
Perhaps the only value of “In Retrospect” is to remind us never to forget that these were men who in the full hubristic glow of their power would not listen to logical warning or ethical appeal … [McNamara’s] regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers … Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose. What he took from them cannot be repaid by prime-time apology and stale tears, three decades later.
The years since have not been any kinder to McNamara’s odious legacy. Osnos’s contribution to the already voluminous literature on Vietnam, despite many wrenching anecdotes of his tortured relationship with LBJ, is not likely to soften the views of those of us who have long despised McNamara’s lethal, self-serving hypocrisy.
This is not to say that there’s little new in LBJ and McNamara, which previously appeared in 18 segments on Peter Osnos’s Platform, his Substack newsletter. It hardly needs saying that anything that furthers our understanding of the emotional dimensions of our national security leaders as they faced crises, however incremental, is valuable—and, ideally, instructive.
“The hundreds of pages of transcripts, I now realized, were more candid and therefore revealing than what McNamara would allow himself to say in the book,” Osnos writes, noting that the work of many others, in particular Robert Caro’s “monumental biography” of LBJ, “have provided me with the narrative to make the point that the Johnson-McNamara partnership, so crucial to the war, was from the outset destined to end in failure.” His own book, he says, “is an account of how this happened and, to the extent possible, why.”
The stage was set for their fatal partnership at the advent of the Kennedy administration, when the president-elect called McNamara in the early winter of 1960 and asked him to be his defense secretary. McNamara, appointed president of the Ford Motor Company the day Kennedy was elected, protested that he was supremely unqualified. He’d achieved a measure of fame as one of the “whiz kids” who had modernized Ford’s managerial practices after World War II, but his familiarity with the military was limited to his service as a helpmate to General Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign on Japanese cities. He was astonished that Kennedy would want him to run the sprawling Defense Department.
“When McNamara told Kennedy that he was not qualified by experience to be secretary of defense, Kennedy replied, who is?” Osnos writes. “There were no schools for defense secretaries, Kennedy observed, and no schools for presidents either.” Decades later, McNamara would expand on his lack of preparation during an editing session with Osnos. “What do I know about the application of force,” he recalled thinking, “and what do I know about the strategy required to defend the West against what was a generally accepted threat … [and] the force structure necessary to effectively counter the threat?”
The “generally accepted threat” was the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, China—big strategic calculations. Communist-backed “wars of national liberation” were still at a manageable boil, it seemed. McNamara’s first shock on that score came in April 1961, during the CIA’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, a preposterous project (in retrospect) that Kennedy had inherited from Dwight Eisenhower and rubber-stamped.
McNamara contributed to the disaster himself, he confessed in his 1995 memoir—an admission that would have startled people at the time:
I had entered the Pentagon with a limited grasp of military affairs, and even less grasp of covert operations. This lack of understanding, coupled with my preoccupation with other matters and my deference to the CIA on what I considered an agency operation, led me to accept the plan uncritically … The truth is, I did not understand the plan very well and did not know the facts. I had let myself become a passive bystander.
The pattern would continue. A year and a half later, JFK and McNamara found themselves in another crisis in Cuba, when the CIA discovered that Moscow had slipped intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles onto the island. The U.S. narrowly averted a nuclear war that its generals—McNamara’s generals—were willing to risk, thanks to the personal backchannel diplomacy of the president and his brother Robert. (In all this, by the way, Johnson, despised by Bobby, wasn’t even a bit player.)
Then came Indochina. Twice burned by terrible advice from the military and the CIA, Kennedy rejected proposals to send American troops into Laos and backed an agreement with the Soviets that made the kingdom officially neutral with a government that divided power among pro-American, pro-communist, and neutral factions. It was a flimsy arrangement, but from Kennedy’s view, it was the best they could come up with to avoid further entanglement.
In any event, they were just making guesses. “As for Vietnam, McNamara said years later, Kennedy and his advisers, for all their pizazz, were ignorant in almost every way possible about Southeast Asia, its languages, its history, its culture—and moreover, in a global battle with communism, Vietnam ‘was a tiny blip on the radar,’” Osnos writes. Unmentioned: the McCarthyist purge of the State Department’s best China experts.
In the early fall of 1963, Kennedy sent McNamara on an inspection trip to South Vietnam, perhaps thinking he could pull a rabbit out of a hat there, too, but a coalition government was out of the question for the hardcore, Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem family ruling the roost. JFK despaired. “It was Kennedy’s strong opinion that the war was South Vietnam’s to fight and win—and should not be America’s responsibility,” writes Osnos.
JFK made plans to start withdrawing the 16,000 military advisers the U.S. had there, but ended up going along with an ill-advised coup ending in the assassination of Diem and his brother that only accelerated the chaos. Three weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated, too, leaving LBJ and McNamara with a mess that included a thriving insurgency and an ongoing program of clandestine warfare against North Vietnam that would lead to the key turning point in the war, the Tonkin Gulf affair. Based on erroneous reports that Hanoi’s torpedo gunboats had conducted an unprovoked attack on a U.S. destroyer off North Vietnam’s coast, President Johnson got a resolution from Congress that gave him political cover to dispatch U.S. ground units to the south and American warplanes over the north. Osnos writes, “No one anticipated that the authority approved after a minor incident in offshore waters would morph into a half million American combat troops and a sustained bombing campaign that would go on for years.”
LBJ was intent to just stave off a complete collapse during the summer of 1964. Obsessed with winning the election and restoring some self-confidence to himself after years of maltreatment by the Kennedys, especially after the Republicans nominated the ultra-hawk Barry Goldwater, Johnson portrayed himself as an opponent to widening the war, even if he was egging on his advisers to “maintain the status quo for six months”—casualties be damned, it must be said, both Vietnamese and American. Kept secret by McNamara at the time: “There was no consensus among the military or among the president’s advisors on what should be done.” But he would be the loyal soldier, whatever doubts he and others had about the strategy. Goldwater would be a disaster. He would keep his mouth shut. Osnos writes,
McNamara’s definition of his role was never under any circumstances to undermine the people’s choice for the nation’s highest office, yet another reason that he subsumed his views on the war into Johnson’s quest for a validating election victory in 1964 and beyond.
“I think the American public and cabinet officers and residents don’t understand the government,” McNamara maintained, in effect rationalizing his reasons for staying on and issuing optimistic statements about the war that he knew were false. There’s only one president; everyone else is a hired gun, stripped of agency. “I didn’t believe I had independent power,” he told his editors. “This is one of the things that affected the way I behaved as Secretary, particularly during Vietnam.”
But his painful breaking point with LBJ was coming. On January, 27, 1965, just days after Johnson’s inauguration, McNamara’s private pessimism was reinforced when the Vietcong “mauled two elite South Vietnamese units in major battles.” Combined with other doleful reports from the field, he said, “these events made me conclude, painfully, and reluctantly, that the time had come to change course.” He and McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser,
delivered a memorandum to the president that portrayed the situation in Vietnam in stark terms: a moment of choosing had come, and Johnson had to decide whether to proceed with a direct US military intervention or a withdrawal of American advisors, leading to a negotiated resolution to the conflict. It became known as the “Fork in the Road” memo.
They chose the wrong fork. “While the memo presented withdrawal and negotiations as an option,” Osnos writes, “McNamara and Bundy told the president that they favored increasing military engagement.” Forceful arguments against escalation were made by other senior advisers, notably Undersecretary of State George Ball, but the hawks carried the day.
McNamara knew it was a mistake—“We were sinking into quicksand,” he later said—but he and Johnson managed to maintain a public posture that no dramatic expansion of the war was underway. Lulled by such assurances, Osnos reports, “a significant majority of Americans supported the war policies, without knowing they were being changed.”
McNamara went along with the subterfuge even as the facts on the ground showed that we were losing. He told his editors, “For me to go public and say we weren’t winning … For anybody—if the president went public and said, ‘we’re not winning,’ because it was a fact in the midst of a war, that is a hell of a thing to say.”
Indeed, it would have been—but it would also have spared the nation, not to mention the Vietnamese, north and south, an immense tragedy, not to mention bloodletting. Clark Clifford, McNamara’s successor as defense secretary, told Osnos and other editors of his own memoir, Counsel to the President, that JFK would have cut bait without remorse, because “in judging matters of this kind, [Kennedy] was a real cold fish … cold, calculating and penetrating.” McNamara would have swung to the cold side, too. He would go along with, and even believed in, troop withdrawals as much as troop increases—whatever his commander in chief wanted.
I always suspected that LBJ gave southern Democrats the war so he could secure their votes on his civil rights and poverty initiatives, but Osnos writes that the president was keeping his incremental escalations secret from them, too, because he would have “come under pressure” from them “to go further and faster.” In any event, the subterfuge was working to the president’s advantage as he managed to win passage of his domestic legislation while fending off demands from hawks to obliterate North Vietnam—or, as Curtis LeMay put it, “bomb them into the Stone Age.”
The military situation only got worse. By the end of the year, McNamara told Johnson, for whom he still maintained great empathy, that the chances of “a military solution to the problem is not certain—one out of three or one in two. Ultimately, we must find a … diplomatic solution.”
The North Vietnamese, alas, were not interested in any deal short of Saigon’s capitulation.
And so LBJ and McNamara plowed on, optimistic in public, doubtful in private, through 1965 and 1966 and beyond, amping up troop levels and bombing raids, with a few fruitless halts in the bombing of Hanoi in between. Antiwar resistance spread at home, not just on campuses but also in the streets and among the children of administration officials. A young Quaker named Norman Morrison self-immolated under McNamara’s Pentagon window; it deeply upset him—but not enough to break with his president. Adding to his eternal disgrace, the defense secretary initiated Project 100,000, which lowered mental and medical standards for enlistees to help fill the cannon fodder pipeline to “the Big Muddy.”
The big crackup had begun. With 35,000 American troops dead, multiples of that wounded, and mounting civilian casualties on the nightly news, fights broke out at Georgetown dinner parties. Children of administration officials rebelled. LBJ had a hard time sleeping. Lady Bird Johnson fretted about “the emotional toll” of the war on her husband. A fraying McNamara, LBJ knew, was done. In late 1967, Johnson arranged a soft landing for his loyal lieutenant at the World Bank. “The word in Washington was that McNamara was at his wits’ end, near a breakdown,” Osnos writes. “When he was emotionally overcome at his retirement ceremony and unable to speak, that perception was widely accepted.”
How did it come to this? The resilience of the communists, combined with the virtually complete ignorance of Washington about the enemy, ultimately proved lethal. Or as Osnos writes, “The Pentagon Papers would show that any grasp of Vietnamese history and culture by the leading U.S. decision makers was too superficial to be useful in deliberations and decisions.”
One could leave it at that. But in LBJ and McNamara, Osnos nails it: “The Vietnam partnership destined to fail was a mismatch of personalities—earnestness to a fault for McNamara and a brew of insecurities and political calculations for Johnson.”
Then there are the roads not taken. Osnos writes,
If John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated on November 22, 1963, and if Robert McNamara had been a man who was as politically astute as he was believed to be accomplished as a manager, and if Lyndon Johnson had been less captive of insecurities eroding his judgment and spirit, then the misbegotten escalation in Vietnam might well have been avoided.
LBJ could have—should have—taken the opportunity to change course when he decided not to run for reelection in March 1968, McNamara confessed to Osnos decades later. “Why didn’t he, when he decided not to run, shift [policy]. Damned if I know. Except that he was the kind of person that never wanted to say he was wrong.” The same might be said of McNamara, whose critics (including his close friend Jackie Kennedy) had long implored him to break with LBJ.
In The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, Errol Morris’s groundbreaking 2003 documentary, the defeated former defense secretary gave voice to the question that has tormented many a presidential adviser since the beginning of the Republic—and most recently during the disastrous wars into which the U.S. has plunged over the past 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan: “It is a profound, enduring, and universal ethical and moral dilemma: how, in times of war and crisis, can senior government officials be completely frank to their own people without giving aid and comfort to the enemy?”
McNamara’s propensity for loyally echoing the views of his commanders in chief would prove fatal for millions under LBJ, an insecure Texan whose fears of defeat against a war-happy Republican drove him into the vortex of a conflict from which neither man could escape.
Osnos notes that McNamara didn’t answer the question. He might have looked to George Ball, who resigned his post in 1966 after being smacked down by McNamara and others over his vehement disagreement with the administration’s Vietnam policy. In any event, few officials since have publicly expressed regret over failing to speak up forcefully against military adventures they considered wrongheaded or reckless. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance is the singular exception in modern times, resigning in 1980 over the Carter administration’s operation to rescue American hostages in Iran (albeit after it was launched).
In his 2019 memoir, the current CIA director, Bill Burns, expressed deep regret over not having objected more forcefully to the impending invasion of Iraq by the George W. Bush administration when he was a senior State Department official. All that he and other dissenters did was write a memo of concern to the White House. “Years later,” Burns wrote in The Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for its Renewal, “that remains my biggest regret.”
The drawing rooms of Georgetown today are filled with the old ghosts of Vietnam regrets and new ones over lessons unlearned. Few of us can escape them.
